October 10, 1889

October 10th, 1889.

We went to Versailles last week and spent the day. It being 14 miles away we took the train (2nd class, 1st class being just twice as much) and reached there in time for breakfast, after which we took a cab which a young officer found for us.    I hesitated thinking it very unkind should he be poor not to give him anything as he had been so much trouble for us, I reluctantly offered it. To my chagrin he politely bowed, tipped his hat and walked off. It reminded me of Miss. Crocher’s experience when she offered a fee to a Count.    We drove about a half mileto Verseilles palace. As we drove up, the size and magnificence of the mass of stone completely appalled us.   The enormous court in front, then the main center ofthe palace with immense wings in each side projecting towards the  entrance in this way.  Louis X1V w s the originator.  He purchased 60 miles of ground and began this stupendous piece of work in 1660, which cost the French government over two hundred millions of dollars and was the direct cause of the 1st Revolution.   That is the original cost and the amount continually expended to keep it up. We went into the main hall or corridor on first floor, passed directly in the gallery of statuary.  This is filled with statues in marble of the noted kings, queens, generals, statesmen of France. A beautiful one of Joan of Arc was most pathetic.   We passed thro gh to the galleries of paintings,successively  picturing the whole history of France from Clovis and Charlemagne down.  One could almost tell the history of this nation had they never read a word, from these pictures. The Crusades under St. Louis 1X occupy a whole room and front of another. The taking of Constantinople by Horace Vernit is a magnificent picture and immense in size.   The wars of Napoleon are pictured by dozens of immense pictures perfectly magnificent.   In each one he is the same magnetic, solitary man communing with himself.   We passed on to the left wing, came to what is called “Salle del Opera” the theater of the kings decorated with chandeliers.   Near here is another gallery of busts and statues of the principal men and women of France up to the 17th century.   On the next floor we see again historical paintings of history up to the Revolutionary of 1830 and then we entered the grand apartments occupied by the various kings and queens from Louis X1V down to Napoleon 111.  We passed through one after the other, dozens it seems to me all called by their names, “Salon de Marie”, Salon de Venus” etc.   Those on the north were the kings which open into each other, and into the throne room.   The Emperor Napoleon 111 opened a brilliant ball in this room with Queen Victoria in a quadrille.   It is immense, and the marble and gilt decorations surpass all imagination, but we were to be still more amazed and delighted as we passed out of this room through the “Salo n Guerre” and “Salon de la Prex” into the gallery of Louis X1V, the most splendid room in the world, 243 ft long, 43 ft high and 35 f  broad.   The ceiling is beautifully frescoed and the walls ornamented marble, pictures, statues etc.  Near and adjoining this gallery are the private reserved apartments of the King L uis XV where he received du Barry and Pompadore.  From this we passed into the bed-room of Louis X1V, the gem of the palace. We saw the bed on which this king died.  On the ceiling is a painting by Paul Veroncu which was taken from Doges palace in Florence by Napoleon 1st.   We passed through to the rooms occupied successively by the queens of all the Louis’.   The room where Marie Antoinette was asleep when the mob came out from Paris, where one of her children were born, through to the queens state apartments, coming round the left wing down stairs we came into the gallery del Empire containing pictures, busts and statues of the Napoleon family.  The “Gallery des Bastiles” is 400 ft long and has pictures of all the great battles of France from the V to X1X century, out of this is “Salle de 1830” illustrating the Revolution, out of this is a room filled with t e historical portraits , among them Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk.  Then follows a room devoted to pictures of royal residences, then a series of 14 rooms filled with portraits of warriors of Frances; then follows the gallery of the kings if France, containg all the kings from Pharomond down to Louis Phillipi.  We then went to the top story and found busts of modern prominent people, George Sand, Rasseau, Voltaire etc. A life sized picture of du Barry and his [corrected to “her” in pencil] children tucked off in one corner.   The French are anything but proud of these second wives of the Louis’, and no mention is made of them in all this display.

We went out into the gardens and Jennie and I nearly went wild All we could say was Oh Lord; Oh Lord;Sixty miles of ground laid out in the most artistic manner.   We walked instead of riding wh which we now regret, and over the space we went we counted twelve fountains.  The largest of these is called Neptune and cost $300000 and is only played on great occasions at an expense of $2000 on each occasion.  The walks the groves, the statuary and flowers surpass all description and I will only say that we were more and more wild with delight with every step.  Walks and drives radiate in every direction from the fountains and one wide avenue leads to theTrianon” two miles away, but we had not time to visit it. It was the country palace of the kings, where Marie Antoinette dressed like a dairy maid and made butter, idling and trifling away the time when the French people were groaning under the awful oppression and taxes which exasperated them into the Revolution of 1789. I have just finished reading it and a new interest is added to everything.  I see and read.

[The typewriter was having some problems in this entry and there are a number of words where a letter is missing. The original typist also made a number of errors.]

[Versailles’ English-language site is here. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site; their page on Versailles includes a lovely photo gallery. Google Cultural Institute has a fairly extensive page on the Palace and Park of Versailles, including old photos, online exhibitions, and the ability to virtually drop into Google Maps’ “street view.”]

[This lengthy entry took me so long to fully transcribe, proof, and research that over the course of this time I went to Peabody Essex Museum, wherein I saw one of the ornamental butter churns that Marie Antoinette used when she and her courtiers pretended to be dairy maids as per this entry. As far as I can determine, the ornamental churn does not appear to be on the museum’s site.]

Wednesday, September ?, 1889

Wednesday Sept. ——-

Went to the exposition. Visited the art galleries of England, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Hungary and the United States. Englands display is poor, much more so than United States. The chief thing of interest to me was a life size picture of Gladstone by Millais, magnificent. He is standing as though addressing the House of Parliament and the flash of his intellect seems almost to speak from the canvass. A beautiful life size portrait of Lady Coldridge, daughter of the – –

poet, in a white lace robe, by Leighton , is to me one of the sweetest things in the gallery. The”Last Rose of Summer” is also superb

The United States display occupies four rooms. Two statues by Story stands at the entrance as you ascend the star case. Some things are fine, especially Bridgman’s picture “Pirate of Lore” attracting crowds. It is in three parts in one immense frame. A/ beautiful girl has fallen asleep in a garden, a peacock fan in her hand. The flowers about her,the shade and vines are climing over the garden wall ; her sweet innocent heavenly face unconscious of all but peace, while over the wall peers a villian. In the next picture the villian has  attacked her, while she is struggling to defend herself, and in the last she lays dead pierced to the heart. The coloring and awful story make it interesting, and the artistic s kill of Bridgman have here found full expression.

[This is the first of a few entries in this subsection that have no exact date but are interspersed with entries that have exact dates whose order doesn’t match up with those that don’t, all leading me to believe that these small number of entries may have been typed out of order.]

[Millais painted multiple portraits of British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone, and so far I have been unable to definitively determine which one was exhibited at the Exposition, though it seems likely it was one painted in the 1880’s. The art critiques I have read suggest that today these portraits are generally not looked very favorably upon as accurately portraying Gladstone’s character, as portrait painting was overall still supposed to do in the Victorian era.]

[By “Coldridge” Addie appears to mean the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but she was confused about his family in this entry. His only known daughter was Sara Coleridge; Sara had died in 1852. The portrait of a woman in the Coleridge family by the painter Frederic Leighton is of Amy Augusta Jackson Coleridge (nee Lawford), second wife of Lord John Coleridge, who was a grand-nephew of the poet. Here is a reproduction of the painting that seems to best match Addie’s description, “Amy Augusta, Lady Coleridge.” Sources vary on its exact date, with some only giving a range; a few sites date it as being finished in 1890, but if it is the correct painting, it would have to have been finished by 1889. It is also possible that this painting really was finished in 1890 and there is a second painting of Lady Amy Augusta Coleridge by Leighton that I haven’t located online. For those interested, here is a contemporary article about Lord and Lady Coleridge’s sensational 1885 marriage.]

[“The Last Rose of Summer” appears to have been a popular painting title, both then and more recently. Without an artist’s name to narrow down results, so far I have been unable to determine which painting titled “The Last Rose of Summer” was shown at the Exposition Universelle de 1889. I did discover that it was a popular song in the late 1800’s and that the song is believed to have inspired at least some of the paintings.]

[It is very likely that the artist Bridgman to which Addie referred was American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman, one of the top “Orientalist” painters of the mid-19th century to early 20th century and one of the best-known American painters of the time. Bridgman had studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme and frequently participated in the Paris Salon. An “Orientalist” painter being featured at the Exposition Universelle de 1889 fits well with what seems to have been a major theme that year. Today Bridgman appears to not be very well known in the States outside of art history and art dealer circles. Here is a blog post on him. Here is a website devoted to him, featuring copies of many of his paintings. If you are browsing at work, be aware that number of his paintings are of nudes. With regards to the specific reference in this journal entry, I have yet to find a painting or set of paintings that he did called “Pirate of Lore”; perhaps it was a colloquial name commonly known at the time.]

Sunday, September 22, 1889

Sunday Sept. 22nd.

This morning came the first rain we have had in Paris, so we studied and read aloud all the morning, concerning the old Masters and directly after breakfast (12 o’clock) we went to the Louvre to find what we had been studying about. We found the Rubens room and a series of magnificent pictures representing the marriage of Henry 1V with Mary DeMedici. They are about 30 feet high by 20 feet in width and 15 in number. The first one represents Angels suspended in mid air weaving the thread of Mary’s life; the second her birth and the third her education; fourth Henry’s first view of Mary’s picture, and the rapture and surprise in his face and attitude; fifth, marriage, sixth birth of Louis XV; seventh, Louis giving the crown to his mother; eighth her coronation; ninth, the tyranny of her reign, luxury of the nobles and misery of the people She stands colossal and imperious holding a rake; tenth, quarrel with her son and so on to the end when she and her son become reconciled. We hunted up all the Titians,Leonardo-de-Vinci’s, Raphael’s and Murillo’s. We admired especially two fine ones of the latter; the”Birth of the Virgin”and the”Conception of the Virgin.”

We spent all the afternoon until four o’clock when the uniformed men with cocked hats came through the rooms crying “Alle; Alle”, which means go out, and the thousands began pouring forth. The earth and sky were fresh from the rain, the sun shining, so we walk ed all the way through the garden of the Tuilleries. We sat down, and watched the fountains playing, and the trees and flowers, it seemed like heaven. What must it have been when the sovereigns of France wandered up and down where we were sitting. The lower part of the garden is noww given up for a public play ground, a mass of shade [Ed. Note: “shade” is added below “of”] with no grass, clear white gravelled earth, every now and then statues and fountains and filled with chairs in fron of a grand stand where a band was playing. Girls and boys were playing ball, nurses by the score with their babies and a kind of general resort for rich and poor alike. We walked through to the Place,del-Concord. An immense square in the center of which is “Cleopatra’s needle”, brought from Egypt and entirely covered with hyrogliphics. Twelve immense pieces of marble statuary on huge bases surround this place and the marble fountains. The Champs Elysee goes directly out from this to the Bois-de-Bologne. This evening we sang hymns from Moody and Sanky, the only American thing I have heard in Paris

[Here is a blog post analyzing the Medici Cycle, focusing on “The Presentation of Her Portrait to Henry IV,” which Addie discussed as well. Here is the Louvre‘s own English-language page on one of the paintings in the Medici Cycle, “The Apotheosis of Henri IV and the Proclamation of the Regency of Marie de Médicis.” The other sites note that the cycle actually consisted of 24 paintings, not 15 as Addie noted in her diary. The discrepancy may be because Addie seems to have been writing about the paintings in one specific room at the Louvre.]

[Three Egyptian obelisks all known colloquially as “Cleopatra’s needle” were re-erected in major ‘Western’ cities over the course of the the 19th century, one each in in Paris, London, and New York City. All three still stand today. The one in Paris, originally from Luxor in Egypt, was erected at Place de la Concorde in 1833 after being presented by viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, to King Louis-Philippe of France in 1829. The delay between gifting and placement of the obelisk now at Paris shows how expensive and difficult it was to move a huge granite obelisk at the time, though the London obelisk’s gap time was more marked, taking nearly 60 years to go from gifting to its new placement. An old engraving of the London Cleopatra’s needle can be seen at this blog post by the Bodleian Library, along with a 19th century song that may have been inspired by the London obelisk’s arrival. After several minutes of searching I was unable to successfully locate a definitively-19th-century photograph or postcard of the Paris obelisk, so I stopped looking for now.]

[Moody and Sankey (not “Sanky” as spelled by Addie) were an American duo who wrote and performed gospel hymns, touring around the United States and United Kingdom performing them. Sankey also wrote many hymns alone and with other collaborators and is estimated to have written approximately 1,200 songs total, many of them hymns. He had served in the U. S. Civil War, as had Addie’s husband. Moody and Sankey were at a revival meeting in Chicago when the Chicago Great Fire occurred in 1871, killing many of the people who were attending it, and Sankey is said to have watched the city burn down from a rowboat on the lake; this experience seems to have profoundly changed Sankey’s life. A biography of Sankey and links to some of his hymns (many including auto-playing music) can be found here. A video featuring Dave Willets’s portrayal of Sankey and a medley of some Moody and Sankey hymns is on YouTube.]

Tuesday, September 17, 1889

Tuesday Sept. 17th.

This morning we took a cab and started out for Madame Tatemans a boarding school just outside the city limits. The coachman did not know the way, so we had a long ride and a good look at Paris. Every time I go out I am astonished more and more at the size ,extent and beauty of this metropolis. We rode out on the “Bois-de-Bologne” the most delightful Boulevard in Paris, with four rows of trees down the whole extent to the park. When we arrived at Madame Tateman’s we were ushered into a beautiful parlor. The Madame came in,a polished French woman speaking English fluently. She took us all over the beautiful school, and I never saw anything so fine for a school. The dining room has a dome and stained glass ceiling. I went there to get the little girls in school, but found everything bfilled. I heard about it on the Gascogne.

This P. M Jennie’s Greek admirer came for us and took us in a carriage to the Louvre, the grandest picture gallery in the world. How can I begin to give any idea of it. It was once the Palace of the sovereigns of France. Begun in 1541 by Francis 1, and finished in 1857 by Napoleon 3. The Government spares no expense in keeping up these galleries of pictures and it costs nothing to enter. Of course there are miles of pictures, but we divided most of the time to among the old Masters, Rubens, Raphael and Murillo. One whole row is devoted to Rubens and the pictures are immense. How one man could accomplish so much in one short life time is a mystery to me The coloring is rich, and the spiritual inspiration is sublime. We saw the famous Last Supper by Leonardo-de-Vinci, and a great number of Raphael’s seraphic pictures, always containing the one face he adored. I do not wonder these men are immortal. The number and grandeur of their works makes one feel their enormous powers and capacity for labor and their transcendant genius. My blood fairly ran cold as I looked at the original works of these great mast ers.

the Louvre is situated in the palaces bordering on the Tulleries garden. We left the Louvre an d went to the Morgue where three dead bodies lay waiting identification. They were a horrible sight. In a glass case one child that had been murdered, its face pounded fearfully. On our way we saw the tower in which Marie Antoinette was imprisoned and from which she was taken for execution. We also saw the native habitation of Heloise and Ableard, and their sorrowful love story had adeeper meaning for me than ever before. We came back and walked through the Palais Royal, filled with rare jewels and everything else under the sun.

This evening was Madame’s Soiree. The parlor filled with guests. Mademoiselle Lita the opera singer sang for us.

[Without a specified location, I have thus far been unsuccessful in identifying the school run by Madame Tateman. I am not completely sure what Addie means by a Boulevard named Bois-de-Bologne, though I can say that she appears to have misspelled “Boulogne” as “Bologne.” The 1889 map on this blog shows a Boulevart de Boulogne running next to the park known as Bois de Boulogne, but I’m not sure why she would have taken that street to get to the park as per the entry since the street ran parallel to the park. The park’s name remains the same but in the intervening century-plus the road has been renamed Boulevard Anatole France. Comparing a modern map (link opens PDF) of Bois de Boulogne to the 1889 map on this blog shows the structure of the park itself appears to have changed little since Addie visited it. The park was one of many changes introduced to Paris by Baron Haussmann (photo of him here), the same person after whom the street where Addie was staying was named; he modeled it on large London parks like Hyde Park.]

[I imagine the Louvre is familiar to all readers. The English-language version of their website is here.]

[When I first read this entry, I was shocked both that a morgue had been open to the public and at the fairly nonchalant tone with which Addie seemed to me to report the visit in the diary, as if morgue visits were an everyday occurrence to Victorians. In subsequent research I discovered that the Paris Morgue was notorious for being open to the public, was frequently mentioned in Victorian tourist guide books as a potential destination, and was visited by many Victorian British writers who wrote about it in the English language. In the article “Returning the Look: Victorian Writers and the Paris Morgue” by Paul Vita (Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 25:3 [2003], pp. 241-256), Vita writes:

“The archives of the Musée de Police in Paris hold no records of how many people visited the nineteenth-century morgue, but a tourist attraction it was. . . . A large plate-glass window separated these two rooms—a sanitary measure, which also ensured that the experience was essentially visual. In 1867, this morgue was demolished, as part of the ‘Haussmannization’ of Paris (Schwartz 55), and replaced by a structure roughly four times the size of the original. Located at the end of the Ile de la Cité, the new morgue was a modernized version of the former: as Vanessa Schwartz points out, the modest Greek temple was replaced by ‘a generic administrative building—symmetrical, made of stone and supported by heavy pillars, with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité written across the front’ (55). This new morgue heightened the spectacle of the first—adding curtains to conceal the changing of the scene, for example (Schwartz 57)—while it accommodated Paris’ growing population of unclaimed corpses and the thousands (often spurred on by a sensational or scandalous story in the press) who came to see them.”

On the blog Victorian Paris, blogger Iva quotes a lengthy passage about Paris Morgue visits from Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin (1867), including: “The morgue is a sight within reach of everybody, and one to which passers-by, rich and poor alike, treat themselves. The door stands open, and all are free to enter. There are admirers of the scene who go out of their way so as not to miss one of these performances of death. If the slabs have nothing on them, visitors leave the building disappointed, feeling as if they had been cheated, and murmuring between their teeth; but when they are fairly well occupied, people crowd in front of them and treat themselves to cheap emotions; they express horror, they joke, they applaud or whistle, as at the theatre, and withdraw satisfied, declaring the Morgue a success on that particular day.”

According to descriptions of exactly where the post-1867 morgue was located, it appears that on the 1889 map on this blog, the large sketch of Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris curiously literally covers up the morgue’s precise location.]

[I have thus far been unable to determine the identity of the opera singer Addie calls “Lita.”]